Urban planning

DEFINITION: The application of long-range, comprehensive decisions by governmental agencies to the growth and development of urban centers and surrounding suburbs

Effective urban planning is increasingly important as a means to protect and improve the natural environment. It ensures that private development decisions result in public benefits as well as private profits.

Successful urban planning benefits a city in many ways. It ensures the timely availability of essential infrastructure and government services, including roads, schools, and utilities; a satisfactory quality of life for all residents; the compatibility of adjacent land uses, including buffers between incompatible uses; the rational allocation of land and the best use for each parcel of land; the prevention of waste; the maintenance of public aesthetics, including open spaces; the promotion of social diversity and diversity in both private and public services and facilities, including housing and commerce; the orderly expansion of existing uses into new physical locations; the preservation of historically and culturally important buildings; and the protection of the natural environment.

History

Urban planning began in antiquity with the planned cities of Greece and pre-Columbian America. Hippodamus, a Greek lawyer who lived in the fifth century BCE, designed the first street layout on a gridiron pattern. The Greeks limited the size of their cities to the carrying capacity of the surrounding farmland. Once an existing site was maximized, the paleopolis, or old town, helped found a second neopolis, or new town, on a new site. Urban planning continued in Europe through Roman and medieval times into the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. Many cities in the New World were planned cities, including Jamestown, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

The technocrats of the nineteenth century developed the first planned urban renewal projects. For example, beginning in 1853, Napoleon III tore down nearly one-half of the buildings in Paris, France, in history’s largest public works and urban renewal project in an effort to improve the street system. In the early twentieth century, the first zoning regulations to separate land uses were enacted in Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Frankfurt, Germany; and New York City. New York City enacted the first regional plan in 1929, regulating housing, highways, building height, and open spaces.

Before the twentieth century, urban planners’ primary emphasis was on design aesthetics and the delivery of services to meet human needs, including sanitation, transportation, housing, and basic utilities. In the early twentieth century, social scientists such as Ernest Burgess and Homer Hoyt began to emphasize the expansion and succession of existing land uses as the basis for planning. They were concerned with the orderly growth and development of the urban area, the outward expansion of existing land uses into new plots of land, the orderly succession of one land use after another on a single plot of land, and the correction of urban social problems resulting from urban growth.

In the mid-twentieth century, Lewis Mumford and others in the “new communities” movement argued that piecemeal, incremental, successive patterns of growth should give way to totally planned, functionally integrated communities. Also, in the mid-twentieth century, Ian L. McHarg, a European planner, began a new emphasis on the physical environment in urban planning. Using a series of geological, geographic, and current land-use overlays, he mapped those plots of land best suited for each of several types of land use.

In 1973 the Council on Environmental Quality recognized a growing consensus that control over land use was probably the most important single factor in improving the quality of the environment. Effective urban planning reduces environmental problems stemming from land-use patterns that impose conflicting or unsustainable demands on the environment. Limiting any negative human impact on urban areas is essential to successful urban planning. One suggested approach is to compare alternative uses of the land according to the relative demands each use places on the environment and to implement the one that minimizes human impact. The reclamation and redevelopment of brownfields (abandoned, sometimes contaminated industrial sites) in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century can be seen as an outgrowth of such an emphasis on reducing negative human impacts in urban spaces. Other means of reducing the human impact on urban spaces include promoting economic initiatives and job growth in order to combat poverty, encouraging community participation in local government, utilizing alternative sources of energy in public transport to reduce air pollution, and creating ways for the public and private sector to work together to problem solve.

Public and Private Sector Planning

Many social scientists have argued that effective urban planning requires a shift in power from the private to the public sector. Public support for urban planning in many European countries allows government agencies to counterbalance private-sector power in urban development. Nations with centralized authority, including many developing nations, and nations with socialist governments also tend to limit private power effectively. In the United States, private-sector freedom is equated with liberty, and government intrusions and regulations are kept to a minimum. Participants in the American private sector are allowed broad leeway in a free market to pursue their interests and to develop and dispose of their property as they see fit.

In addition, the pluralist nature of electoral politics and government decision-making in the United States provides the private sector with multiple opportunities to influence public decisions through political appointments, campaign donations, and lobbying. Governmental jurisdictions tend to be fragmented into multiple units (cities, counties, and special districts), each with a unique set of functions, fiscal resources, expertise, and constituencies. These units of government often lack the time, resources, or interest to develop long-range, comprehensive, rational urban planning. Advocates of free-market environmentalism argue against increased government involvement in urban planning and assert that the private self-interest of economically active individuals ensures that land uses are rationally allocated across the landscape and that urban development does not destroy the environmental life-support system on which the survival of the urban area depends.

Climate Change and Urban Planning

In the early twenty-first century, global climate change became another factor in urban planning and development. Researchers in the field state that the primary means of addressing the concerns have been mitigation of and adaptation to climate change impacts. For instance, increased tidal flooding due to rising sea levels spurred the coastal city of Annapolis, Maryland, to redraw flood maps and begin offering incentives to residents and businesses that take flood-protection measures. Researchers further noted that vulnerability and resilience in the urban environment must be considered as well. Mitigation efforts can have global implications and often focus on climate change indicators such as increasing flood zones or how transport affects carbon emissions. Adaptation occurs on a more local level in urban planning and allows communities agency to correct and control effective tools against climate change.

Climate change affects such areas of urban planning as urban sprawl, renewal efforts, density, infrastructure, and transportation. Classic urban-planning strategies such as land-use zoning have been applied to mitigating the climate effects of urbanization while improving energy efficiency has become a key factor in infrastructure and transportation projects. Urban planners in many cities have focused on improving the walkability of many cities and making public transportation more accessible and enjoyable to use. Urban planners not only must address the physical challenges attendant to climate change but also face a lack of political will in many places, overlaps and gaps among different levels of government and nongovernmental initiatives, and differential needs and resilience among municipal populations.

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